"WE STRONGLY BELIEVE THAT WE ALL HAVE AN OBLIGATION TO HELP END THE IVORY TRADE AND POSITIVELY CONTRIBUTE TOWARD ALL EFFORTS TO SAVE THESE EXTRAORDINARY CREATURES."

- Martin Guitar

Martin Guitar has a long history of environmental stewardship. We appreciate the value that our customers place on our instruments and we believe the feel and sound are inseparable from the materials we use. Our ecological policies were formalized in 1990, embracing the judicious management and responsible use of natural materials and alternative wood species. Long before that, however, we substituted a synthetic for the ivory used on our instruments. In the 1970s, we began to phase out the usage of ivory because the demand led to soaring prices of tusks, which in turn, resulted in the slaughter of elephants. We created a hang tag for our guitars, at that time, that reinforced our position on the usage of elephant ivory reinforcing the message that "C.F. Martin & Company refused to be a contributor to this atrocity."

We have continued to develop and use materials that we believe comply with our sense of environmental stewardship. In 2013 we decided to stop using Preserved Mammoth Ivory (PMI) and implemented a plan to phase the material out on all Standard models, Special Editions, Special Orders, Authentic Series and Custom Shop models. We are very pleased to say that PMI, like elephant ivory before, has been completely removed from our supply chain and is no longer used on any guitar model we manufacturer. We strongly believe that we all have an obligation to help end the ivory trade and positively contribute toward all efforts to save these extraordinary creatures.

"The guitars we're building today, I believe, are among the best in our company's history. When future generations look back at what we've done together, my hope is for them to see how much of our great tradition we have sustained, while at the same time, to see how boldly we have moved into the future."